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Melbourne uni owes staff $72m in unpaid wages, UniSQ confirms 150 staff laid off
The University of Melbourne will fork out a total of $72m to cover the underpayments of 25,000 staff, after investigations into wage theft claims found the institution had failed to properly pay employees over a 10-year period.
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The $72m payout is immense, but also reflects that for many years at this university, where I teach, casual staff contracts were driven down in cost, unlawfully it turns out, by managers and even individual lecturers wanting or needing to save costs in their classes. Some lecturers were much harsher on tutors and markers than others as part of this. I was always extremely generous with hours allocated to tutors because I respected this workforce. The problem was made worse by devolved budgeting, still in place, where faculties and schools have been forced to at least break even. When finance was centralised up until the 2000s, there was less pressure to keep costs low at unit level.